The Vibrant Strings of Life: a continuum of matter in motion.
- Eleni Danesi
- Oct 18
- 5 min read
by Eleni Danesi
Abstract
This essay explores the intersection between architecture, movement, and interspecies materiality through the lens of Somatic Architecture. It unfolds the notion of vibration as a connective tissue—both physical and affective—between bodies, materials, and environments. By weaving together tactile making, aerial performance, and ecological consciousness, the essay proposes knitting as a method for sensing porous boundaries between species, redefining what it means to build, inhabit, and feel architecture.
1. Vibrations as the Architecture of Existence
Life is composed of oscillations. Every being vibrates—molecules, membranes, thoughts, atmospheres—and through these vibrations, worlds are woven. Architecture, when seen somatically, ceases to be the act of constructing stable forms and becomes instead the art of tuning relations.
To live architecturally is to listen to the strings of life: the fibers that extend from our skin into the materials, landscapes, and beings around us. These strings are not metaphors but realities of connection—tensions, rhythms, and resonances that allow perception itself to emerge.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty once wrote that perception is not a passive reception but a participation in the world’s becoming. Somatic Architecture takes this further: to perceive is to build, and to build is to feel. The body is not separate from space; it is space in motion, vibrating at multiple frequencies, negotiating constant exchange between interiority and exteriority.
2. Knitting as Method: Thinking Through Threads
Knitting is one of the most ancient gestures of human making, yet its philosophical depth often goes unnoticed. Each loop connects past to future, hand to fiber, tension to release. When I knit as an architect and aerial artist, I understand it as a method for thinking through the body—a rhythmic epistemology that translates vibration into structure.
In this practice, the silkworm becomes my silent collaborator. Like the silkworm, I spin shelter from movement, crafting space as a form of embodied continuity. The cocoon, in this sense, is both architecture and organism—an interbeing of fiber and intention.
Tim Ingold speaks of “making as a process of correspondence,” where the maker follows the material’s lead. In this process, knitting is not domination but dialogue: a tactile conversation between hand, fiber, gravity, and air. The knitted artefact becomes an extension of skin, a porous membrane that breathes with its environment.
Knitting, then, is not merely a technique. It is a method of contemplation—a way to sense the invisible threads that bind species, elements, and gestures. It is a practice of attention, patience, and entanglement.
3. The Language of Vibration: Nonverbal Signaling
Before language, there was vibration. Before architecture, there was resonance. All living beings communicate through the subtle pulsations of sound, touch, and frequency. In my aerial movement practice, I inhabit this prelinguistic field: suspended in a knitted structure, I feel the vibrations of my own weight translated into the fibers’ responsive tension.
Here, communication transcends speech. The body becomes a tuning device, decoding the silent conversations between gravity and resistance. These nonverbal signals are architectural—they shape how space feels, how balance is distributed, how the nervous system organizes perception.
Neuroscience suggests that the brain interprets vibration as a fundamental form of information. Erin Manning describes this as the minor gesture: the micro-movements that precede thought, the relational murmurs that compose affective fields. Through vibration, we learn to sense architecture not as static, but as alive, mutable, and responsive.
4. Sculpting with Nature: Porous Boundaries
Traditional architecture separates. It distinguishes inside from outside, human from nonhuman, subject from object. Yet in the somatic and ecological realms, these separations dissolve. The skin—the first architecture of life—is not a border but a threshold. It is porous, permeable, alive with microbial others and atmospheric exchanges.
To sculpt with nature means to acknowledge this porosity. When I mold a form in clay or hang from knitted structures, I am sculpting from within this threshold. I am neither entirely human nor entirely environment, but a continuum of matter in motion.
Donna Haraway reminds us to “make kin, not categories.” Interspecies architecture emerges precisely here: where we unlearn the habit of seeing ourselves as separate from other species and begin to recognize ourselves as one species among many—woven into the same fabric of living systems.
The silkworm, the spider, the coral, the bird: all are builders. Each leaves traces of intelligence in matter. Somatic Architecture proposes that to build like a silkworm is to inhabit making as sensing—to weave shelters that breathe, transmit, and respond.
5. The Somatic Ecology of Architecture
If we understand architecture as a somatic ecology, then every wall, every fiber, every breath participates in a choreography of exchange. The nervous system and the environment mirror one another; both are networks of tension and release, signal and silence.
Deleuze and Guattari wrote that the body without organs “is not a corpse but a field of immanence.” Likewise, Somatic Architecture views space as a body of affective potential—a living fabric of possibilities that can be stretched, folded, and reactivated through movement.
Vibration, in this sense, becomes a pedagogical tool: it teaches us to listen differently, to think through touch, to build from sensation rather than abstraction.
6. Toward an Interspecies Imagination
To build with the awareness of porous boundaries is to step into an interspecies imagination. This imagination does not design for others but with others—silkworms, stones, air currents, microbial communities, human gestures. It is an architecture that arises from reciprocity, not control.
The Vibrant Strings of Life are not metaphors. They are the material and affective filaments that sustain all forms of existence. They remind us that architecture, like life, is not constructed once and for all—it is continuously woven, stretched, repaired, and reimagined through relation.
Conclusion: To Weave Otherwise
To live architecturally is to weave ourselves otherwise—to recognize that we are threads in a planetary textile of movement, sensation, and co-creation.
The practice of Somatic Architecture, when aligned with ecological consciousness, becomes an ethics of sensitivity. It invites us to feel the weight and lightness of materials, to listen to what vibrates beneath language, and to acknowledge the silent architectures that other species have long practiced.
Through knitting, vibrating, sculpting, making, and moving, we learn not only to design space—but to participate in the living architecture of the world.
References
Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Félix. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016.
Ingold, Tim. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. Routledge, 2013.
Manning, Erin. The Minor Gesture. Duke University Press, 2016.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Routledge, 1962.
Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine. The Primacy of Movement. John Benjamins, 1999.
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